Byrne and Butler will discuss "How Music Works" "in the context of their own personal and professional experiences as musicians and music lovers," according to Drawn & Quarterly. The book is to be published in September by McSweeney's. The official description of the book says:

Acting as historian and anthropologist, raconteur and social scientist, he searches for patterns—and shows how those patterns have affected his own work over the years with Talking Heads and his many collaborators, from Brian Eno to Caetano Veloso... His range is panoptic, taking us from Wagnerian opera houses to African villages, from his earliest high school reel-to-reel recordings to his latest work in a home music studio (and all the big studios in between).